The nation is on the lookout for Spring. And so am I.
Despite the harsh, harsh and cold winds of this week, and the redundant snowfall last week, there nevertheless appear daffodil buds above the dirt, some quite robust in appearance, as if emboldened by the lack of warm days. They seem to cope better than I.
I have been distracted from reporting by a heavy travel and work schedule, but also FDA itself seems to be somewhat quiet. Until the 11th, there had not been a press release since February 27 and there have been only two letters issued by the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) all year. Perhaps the cold is bothering them as well.
Here is a bit of what caught my eye.
- Pew Creates Excellent World Wide Web Timeline – That never-ending font of all things good related to knowledge and research involving the Internet – the Pew Internet Research Project – put together a most excellent timeline to mark the 25 year anniversary of the World Wide Web. The web, which involved a whole bunch of information made foundable by the development of search and about which we wanted to talk about in via our new interconnectedness that began with email and instant messaging and went on to all forms of social media, bears some remarkable milestones, many of which were relatively recent. A few of my favorites – 1990 – 42% of American adults have used a computer; 1996 – 77% of online users send or receive an email every few weeks; 1997 – Google registers as a domain… and there are many more gems. Check it out here.
- Migraine Device Approved – If you saw this, you might have been confused like I was at first. On March 11, FDA issued a press release entitled “FDA Allows Marketing of First Medical Device to Prevent Migraine Headaches“. Why confused? Because it said “First” and yet I had a tremendous sense of having seen this before. So, I consulted my new, handy, dandy data base that I made of FDA press releases and did a sort on “Approvals, Devices and Migraine” and there it was from December 2013 – “FDA Allows Marketing of First Device to Relieve Migraine Headache Pain“. And so, mystery solved – the most recent was to prevent migraines and the earlier was to relieve. Two different devices, two different companies, one prevent and one relieve. One interesting thing of note here – the December 2013 announcement on the device to relieve migraine pain was also released in Spanish. The 2014 announcement about the device to prevent migraines was only released in English. It is a challenge to those of us trying to discern the pattern here.
That’s it for me this week. I hope everyone has a great and trending warmer weekend.
